There's some new technology that a company is developing (I apologize, I can't remember the company off hand) that could replace captcha. It's basically a slide bar that you have to move until a picture comes into focus, like the focus dial on a camera. Perhaps they could use that?

Always good to see JW talking about D3 and being ethuthiastic about the future of the game!

And I agree with other comments here, I would not want to be answering CAPTCHA questions if I'm playing. There has to be a better way to detect and stop cheaters without having to inconvenience legit players. I think casual players would be turned off and stop playing.

I think Captchas is a terrible idea. The point is that you don't want to annoy legit users too much just to suppress bots.

The absolute bot-free environment is one where all accounts are locked and nobody plays the game. One has to find a middle way. There are already some of measures that reduce cheats/bots/hacks, which all come at the cost of making the game more inconvenient for legit players. Examples:

How bout instead of a CAPTCHA to prevent botting, ban accounts that are logged in and playing 24 hours a day 7 days a week. No human could possibly do that, and if it wasn't bots, it would have to that multiple people are playing on the account, which is also a violation of the TOS.

lol @ Jay: "when we released diablo 3, at the time we felt like it was the best game we could make" .... "and the diablo 3 we have now is the diablo 3 we want"

I think the captcha idea is a bad solution to a bad problem, as it will only really catch casual botters. For the people making a business out of it, they'll most likely have someone monitoring 100s of bots, filling in a captcha/minute. That being said, it would be a deterrent, and I'm not sure how much of the economy is broken by casual botters (it might far outweigh the pros).

Edit: also at no mention of d3up.com > diabloprogress & diablostats as a gear/dmg comparator tool